YOU’RE NEXT According to Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett

Adam Wingard & Simon Barrett, San Francisco, CA 4/28/13

Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett take the art and craft of the horror film very seriously. And when I spoke to them on April 28, 2013, it was not all fun and games. They were refreshingly cerebral about horror, and about what they wanted to accomplish with YOU’RE NEXT. In little things, such as the fact that they didn’t want anyone tied to a chair, which is apparently a recognized sub-genre of horror film, or that they also, despite the blood and guts, didn’t want to be mean-spirited, and punish their audience, but instead wanting to reward said audience by not insulting its intelligence. The result is a fun, not entirely serious, but seriously scary film that will ruin the more pastoral associations of animal masks forever. And I got to ask if, since they tend to work with the same actors over and over again, if at any point these actors get to choose how they get slaughtered in a film.

YOU’RE NEXT is their horror film that mixes home invasion, animal masks, and the genuine terrors of the family meal. Said family, the Davisons, has its own formidable elements of dysfunction that will become even more apparent as a masked band of murders makes hash of the family reunion, and the family itself. The film stars Amy Seimetz, Joe Swanberg, Ti West, Rob Moran, Barbra Crampton, Nicholas Tucci, Wendy Glenn, Margaret Laney, AJ Bowen, and Sharni Vinson as the girlfriend meeting the family for the first time. Wingard and Barrett’s previous work includes V/H/S, the “Q” segment of THE ABCS OF MURDER, and A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE.